True, though not on the same scale as Zope, for example (or the othersI list below).

If you're saying it didn't really fail but actuallywasn't even seriously attempted,

Not sure what the goals were, but I'm not sure they were to competewith Netscape and IE. CNRI funding -- "R" for research -- seems toimply I do remember correctly (one of us should really check the factshere... oh well, it's USENET ;-).

Do correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to imply, in saying "wasn'teven seriously attempted", that if Grail wasn't intended to be aNetscape-replacement, it must have had no purpose at all. That'scertainly not obvious to me.

ok, that's even fewer substantialprograms that have even been tried in Python.

The project stopped, according to the tarball, because CNRI didn'twant to allocate more money to it because of low usage compared to,the big two of the day. Given that, what do we learn from Grail?

Well, what does the *existence* of Grail tell us (along withsimilar-size projects like Mailman)? It tells us that projects atleast that large are feasible. What does the *ending* of Graildevelopment tell us about Python's suitability for development oflarge projects? Not a lot: all we know is that it *didn't* run intothe problems that afflict large-scale projects (if you believe thetarball README, anyway).

Others provided (in a different bit of the thread) at least oneexample of a much larger system, solving a problem that would take abest-estimate of on the order of a million lines of C++ code if solvedin C++. Other people posted examples in an thread last year:eg. Peter Hansen with another project the same size as Zope (therehave been lots of other threads too, by the look of it -- but Ihaven't scoured those for examples). Twisted is at least that big,too (according to pycount.py run on the old version of Twisted that'ssitting on my hard drive -- again, it seems to spit out multiple totallines, so I hope it's working right...!).

Of course, the above two paragraphs (implicitly) points out the bigjoke here: it seems hard to dispute that reducing the number of linesof code needed by an order of magnitude is a good way of reducing riskon big projects. Now, what sort of language would you pick to achievethat? C++ or Java? Or Lisp or Python?